


love always wakes the dragon

by opensummer



Series: let me tell you a story about war [3]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Brainwashing, Canonical Child Abuse, Gen, Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-12
Updated: 2014-10-12
Packaged: 2018-02-20 10:33:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2425502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/opensummer/pseuds/opensummer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Love is for children.” She said dismissively, knowing it is a lie.</p>
            </blockquote>





	love always wakes the dragon

**Author's Note:**

> Written pre-Winter Soldier

They started her young. If she reaches far enough back she can remember the red of the flames that destroyed her parents farm, the red of their blood, the hands of the men who pulled her away from them.

They took her somewhere cold, where the memory of her parents fades to tattered snatches. She learns love is for children there. Regimes fall every day. And there's red. The red of her hair, on her hands as they teach her what it means to love. There are other girls there, daughters of Mother Russia. The program is called the Black Widow Initiative and it will only have one graduate.

They show her how to hide knives in her bra, red to match her hair, to match the red on the floor. Guns and poisons for cleaner hands, less red. She doesn't like that, clean hands. It feels dishonest.

She will not be her own person for long time yet, and all she knows is red.

+

“Love is for children”, she'll say to Hawkeye, Barton, the first time they meet face-to-face ten-fifteen years down the road. She's older then she looks, younger then she feels, youthful and smooth faced and they've spent the past week playing cat and mouse with arrows and knives.

He smiles at her, wide and open, and she thinks for a moment all the different ways to kill him, and the ways he would counter them. He says, “I think I'm in love” and buys her a drink knowing exactly who and what she is.

She says “Love is for children” but she might love him for that.

+

The instructors in the initiative dump her, and the others though she has little to do with them, in the wilderness when she's nearly a teenager, with a knife and wearing a dress. She comes back colder, having spent a week being hunted by a wolf pack. Blood on snow, red on white in new forms, more red to her ledger.

Few of them make it back, but it's clear who Mother Russia's newest assassin will be.

+

In between Hawkeye pops up on her radar and she on his. They fuck for the first time in Mexico, in between missions, not that either of them really does downtime. Seven months later he'll pull her out some outdated Latverian trap, complete with a villain and a death ray and she kisses him before she relieves him of the files they've both been sent to collect.

Another four months beyond that he'll put an arrow in the head of a scientist whose guard detail she was in charge of, in a shot previously thought impossible. (That he never manages to replicate it says much for its difficulty.) She sweeps him a bow before disabling, not killing, the SHIELD goons and making her escape.

She deals in red.

+

The Black Widow is tired when Budapest rolls around and she pulls Barton out a collapsed building that he was foolish enough to be standing on when it blew. She hides him in a safe house she probably shouldn't know exists and spend the hours he's awake curled into his side, keeping him alive. She tells him about her time with the Russian national ballet, doesn't tell him how she's not certain whether or not this actually happened.

(While he sleeps, she booby traps the surrounding half-mile of open space, and pulls a sniper rifle from the armory and aims for heads of the cannon fodder who just won't stop coming. She kills more men that weekend then she has in years and the land is scarred by the grenades she rigged to the trees but it's worth it when he gains full consciousness again in a white hotel room, because she killed all the men after him and she is so very sick of red.)

(He smiles at her like he did when she was younger, wide and open, and says, “Your eyes are very blue.”)

+

Some of her memories are false. She cannot determine which.

(She dreams of twirling on stage in white, sixteen, eighteen years old, the hollows of her clavicle deep, her toes cracked and bleeding.)

+

They have her kill a child after that, the daughter of a defector and leave her body for her father to find. It's not the first time she's killed children but it's the first time she hesitates. The job is done and she begins planning her retirement.

It's not long after that she blows the bunker they raised her in, with the remnants of the Black Widow Initiative and the Red Room, having cleared out the files on her first.

Her name, she finds, is Natasha.

+

Instead of heading for the border immediately she goes to Moscow, a traitor and proud, with red on her hands. She buys the grand box in the Moscow Ballet, the most exposed to the audience and goes in black, with long red hair, bait for her enemies. That no one takes a shot at her says much for her reputation.

After the show she's shown the hallway with they immortalize the dancers and she looks for herself in the faded pictures. She is not there.

In some ways that is worse then the blood on her hands, which she can at least pretend was a choice.

+

Natasha braids her hair before she cuts it, and leaves it on the bed of her hotel room, and hops a freight train headed west.

“There are wolves.” Said the men who raised her, touching her still long hair. “And there are girls. Girls in red.”

There’s a punchline.

+

She spends the next few years working within the specific skill set she has. She doesn't pretend to be a good person, but she no longer kills children. She draws attention to herself going freelance, not the positive kind. She's a danger and it's not really a surprise when Hawkeye, Barton puts an arrow into the wall of a crummy hotel room, three inches from her left eye.

When he wants someone dead, they die, but her, he'll kill with his hands, because she saved his life once or twice, and he told her that her eyes were very blue. She takes the hint and meets him on the roof.

He might be able to kill her, and she might be able to kill him. It's a question they never settle (that comes later) when he offers her a job over the clear anger of his handler.

She takes it because there's red in her ledger, on her hands and the floor, and she wants to wipe it out. If love is for children, then redemption must also be theirs, but that doesn't mean she can't try.

+

Fury is furious, but he recognizes her value. The man understands how to use the tools available and she understands what it means to be used.

Barton calls her Nat and Tasha. When SHIELD grounds her for the three months after Barton’s impromptu recruitment, he takes leave and the room next to hers in the grim building they stash her in. They fight to kill each other, and she's never been more grateful, because she might have killed someone without him.

They're partners.

+

She’s working for the right side now. But her assignments haven’t changed. She kills people for money, pointed at a target and released. She still lets men inside her for their secrets and their lives and from this side of the fence it doesn’t seem that much different from the other side.

+

Natasha and Clint work separately sometimes. Not often, which is how she meets Coulson who believes in heroes but makes no claims to being one. She likes him. (That makes it hurt more when he dies, a spear through his guts.)

Stark, she dislikes as a waste. Natasha thinks he could be great, if he chose to be. But he didn't or hasn't and she will waste no time on fools.

+

Natasha's running intel for SHIELD when the call comes, Coulson being the only one brave enough to make it. She's dropped the general and his thugs before her mind catches up, and headed for India before she settles. She doesn't want to kill Barton, not if she can help it.

+

Banner frightens her because he could kill her. Effortlessly. There are half a dozen people who could murder her and one of them would walk away completely unscathed. (She promises him later, in the helicarrier, things will be ok and knows she's lying.)

+

“Love is for children” She says to Loki dismissively, knowing it's a lie, knowing it's what he needs to hear to force him to speak. She forces the words underneath her skin until it doesn't hurt anymore, and knows she'll swallow poison before she allows him to force Clint to kill her. (She's always known that Hawkeye would be the one to kill her. But not like this, not today.)

Natasha takes what she needs from that conversation, uses it, too little, too late.

+

Now, she promises Banner it's going to be ok and knows she's lying. Thor takes out Banner before he kills her and the call comes for anyone to take on Barton.

They fight, like they want to kill each other, and she watches his eyes unnatural blue, flicker to a normal shade after she slams him to the rail again.

+

Clint says, “Do you know what it’s like to be unmade?”

Natasha twirls a knife between her fingers, flips it over her thumb, without breaking her rhythm repeats with her other hand. Says, “What do you think?”

+

Natasha is a spy, an assassin, not a soldier, but she's never been so willing to go to war before. Loki got under her skin, and if he bleeds red she'll find out. There was red in her ledger long before he came to earth, more will only hurt him.

They drop into the war zone that is New York.

(When she was young, they told her this would be the first city to fall. The first city she would conquer, Mother Russia’s eldest daughter.)

+

“There are wolves.” Said the men who raised her, touching her still long hair. “And there are girls. Girls in red.”

“Both have teeth.”

+

  
The Chitauri bleed black, and today she coats her ledgers in the stuff and paints over the names in red.

Today she saves the world.

There is red on her hands.


End file.
